The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus

by Rich Villodas

We are increasingly distanced from people with whom we disagree. But this was not Jesus’s approach.

“Reconciliation is an ongoing spiritual process involving forgiveness, repentance and justice that restores broken relationships and systems to reflect God’s original intention for all creation to flourish.”5

I’m convinced that so much of the misunderstandings related to this conversation are related to our inability to get clear on language.

Lisa Sharon Harper’s simple delineation of terms helpful, as she distinguished race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality from a biblical perspective:

Race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality often are used as interchangeable words, but each one has a different shade of meaning….

Ethnicity is biblical (Hebrew: goy or am; Greek: ethnos). Ethnicity is created by God as people groups move together through space and time….

Culture is implicit in Scripture, but the word itself is never used. Culture is a sociological and anthropological term that refers to the beliefs, norms, rituals, arts, and worldviews of particular people groups in a...

Nationality indicates the sovereign nation/state where an individual is a legal citizen. It is a geopolitical category determined b...

Race is about power—in political terms, dominion. As a political construct, race was created by humans to determine who can exercise power within a governing structure and to guid...

American novelist James Baldwin observed, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”7

At the core of racism is the lie that some people are superior or inferior to others. This happens across all different people groups.

Each of us has our prejudices, and the vast majority (if not all of us) have been formed by an “ism” of this world that creates barriers between us and others (classism, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, ageism).

We are all shaped by a particular history and context and formed by family, friends, and the media. This means ...

To do the work of racial reconciliation is to take ownership of the marginalizing ways we see others who are in some form or another different from us.

The racial bias in the hands of people of color is quite different from racial bias in the hands of the dominant culture.

In the dominant culture, racial prejudice morphs into racism in larger institutional and societal ways. Individual racial prejudice is about how we negatively and often violently perceive others, but institutional racism is about how power is used.

Paul wrote about invisible powers and principalities that are at work in our world (see Ephesians 6:12). Scripture identifies a triumvirate axis of evil that is all spiritual: flesh-and-blood human individuals, incorporeal beings (demons), and the evils embodied in the structures and collective consciousness of what Scripture calls “this present darkness.”

responsibility, and sin. In one of his incisive articles, sociologist Dr. Michael Emerson remarked, “Whites tend to view racism as intended individual acts of overt prejudice and discrimination…. Most people of color define racism quite differently. [For people of color], racism is, at a minimum, prejudice plus power, and that power comes not from being a prejudiced individual, but from being part of a group that controls the nation’s systems.”8

In truth, both individual racism and systemic racism are our realities. But systemic/institutional racism is a way that power in a society is ordered to give advantage to some and disadvantage to others.

One of the many reasons we need to read the Prophets is because they speak to the public dimension of God’s love. Many of us have experienced the personal or private dimension of God’s love; we know what it’s like to receive his grace and kindness personally. But the prophets remind us that God’s love is not just a private affair. As American philosopher Dr. Cornel West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”9

justice very simply is about having right relationships, one with another.

To do justice means that every person is taken seriously as a human being made in the image of God.

Whether an institution is political, religious, economic, or related to law enforcement, it has the potential to establish systems that work against the good of humanity, whether intended or not.

Every institution has the unfortunate capacity to give advantage to some and disadvantage to others, to bring privilege to some and pain to others.

Before I present a number of practical ways forward, I want to close this chapter by highlighting four misunderstandings about racial reconciliation.

We Assume That Racial Reconciliation Is Possible Without Justice

There can be no true reconciliation without justice. For relationships to be fully restored, t...

We Assume That Racial Reconciliation Means Color Blindness

“I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). God sees all the color.

We Equate Diversity with Racial Reconciliation

diversity is a good thing, but in and of itself, it is not the same as reconciliation.

When we make diversity the end goal, we are no different from New York City subway cars. New York City subway cars are crowds of diverse, anonymous people in close proximity. But the church is called to be more than a sanctified subway car.

When the gospel is deeply at work, racial reconciliation results in a diverse community that embraces the unique gifts and acknowledges the distinctive sins of their ethnic-racial-social makeup while experiencing loving communion with others under the lordship of Jesus.

We Want Friendship or Evangelism to...

Believers often think that if we can only convert more people to Christianity, this will solve the issue of racism. We think that if someone makes a decision for Jesus, this will end his or her racialized perspectives. So the goal becomes to just bring into the Christian fold as many of those diverse people as possible. But history has shown that some of the worst racist behavior has come from within the Christian fold.

A multifaceted problem requires a multifaceted solution. It requires us to establish a new set of racial habits (or disciplines) to deeply form us.

In his book Democracy in Black, professor Eddie Glaude wrote, “Everyone possesses racial habits, often without even realizing it. Habits, in general, predispose us to see our world in particular ways, and often we consider them helpful things…. Not only do these habits shape how we interact with people of different racial backgrounds, they also guide how we think about and value groups collectively.”1

Every country in the world has some measure of racial hostility and tension, but I want to focus particularly on life in the United States.

The divisiveness and racial injustice we are experiencing today is the fruit of centuries of racial oppression and hostility.

James Baldwin aptly pointed out, “The inequalities suffered by the many are in no way justified by the rise of a few.”2

On a personal level, we can’t understand our present reality without an honest recognition of our past. The same principle applies to our present national reality.

Unless we look back to see how we have been improperly formed, we will continue to live out the same patterns from one generation to the next. This tool has broader use, as it applies to our churches and country as well.

The goal of doing a genogram as an individual is not to hate your parents and families; it’s to objectively assess the good, the bad, and the ugly. The same applies for our country: to look at the history of our country is not to result in us hating it; in all actuality, it’s to help us love it better.

Our refusal to honestly look at the dark history of the United States often reveals an idolatry of the heart.

Author and lawyer Bryan Stevenson described an American “narrative of racial difference” that was an enduring and dangerous myth plaguing much of its people’s collective consciousness: “The great evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude and forced labor. To me, the great evil of slavery was the narrative of racial difference, the ideology of white supremacy that we created to make ourselves feel comfortable with enslaving people who are black. We’ve never addressed that legacy.”3

This hierarchy has served as the impetus for lynching, segregation, myriad civil rights abuses, and the ever-present “othering” that often leads to violence.

No one wants to be categorized by some of the most racist and evil deeds in American history. At the same time, to imply that the residue of racism is nonexistent is to turn our eyes away from that which is painfully obvious to many.

The purpose of honestly wrestling with history is to see where we have been and how we are still being formed by the myths, narratives, and practices of the past.

Now, I can work hard to be anti-sexist, but if I don’t painstakingly sit with the truth that I have been a beneficiary of a society that privileges men over women, I’m not going to help move the conversation in the best direction.

George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Emory University. He is the author of Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America.